Hello,
A bit embarrassed, I have been away from the databasing side of system development for quite a while so am a little rusty. This seems like a simple issue. I have a USER table: userID fName lName address address2 city province country referrerID userID is the unique primary key. My question pertains to referrerID. The referrerID specifies which OTHER USER referred this new user. Thus it is a foreign key that links to a userID in another user record. I do not recall ever linking attributes from the same table (even for different records) so I have a hunch that the way to do this properly is either: (A) User UserReferrer --------- ------------------- userID (the new userID)-------userID referrerID (the userID of the referrer) or (B) just store referrerID as a number and use a simple query to get the info for the referrer when it is required. Select name from USER Where userID=currentUsersID Which is the correct way of doing this? If both, which would be ideal, this will be a relatively large database with approx 250,000+ users, not all will have referrerIDs, I would wager maybe 1-10% of these people will have been referred. Priorities for us are simplicity/scalability, efficiency (in that order) Ben A. Hilleli Programmer / Analyst